Esther Elliot was diagnosed with Keratoconus by an optician when she was a child and has struggled with her sight ever since.

Her keratoconus – a condition which produces a cone like progressive bulge of the cornea and restricts vison - was always extremely severe in her right eye. After losing her vision completely in that eye aged 13 she...

“It was like shop shutters coming down then opening again. I would get bars across my eyes for a couple of minutes and then the bars would lift but week by week my vision was getting more and more blurry. I was getting headaches. I couldn’t see people’s faces unless they were very close to me. Glasses didn’t help. I relied on voice recognition when people knocked at the front door. It was getting very frightening.”

That’s how pensioner Mrs Ayse Hassan describes the state of her deteriorating sight in both eyes before she underwent an operation...